vi ORIGIN OF THE COLOUR-SENSE 413 



the late Lazarus Geiger, entitled, Zur Entwickelungs-geschicUe 

 der Menschheit (Stuttgart, 1871). According to this writer it 

 appears that the colour of grass and foliage is never alluded to 

 as a beauty in the Vedas or the Zendavesta, though these 

 productions are continually extolled for other properties. 

 Blue is described by terms denoting sometimes green, some- 

 times black, showing that it was hardly recognised as a 

 distinct colour. The colour of the sky is never mentioned in 

 the Bible, the Vedas, the Homeric poems, or even in the 

 Koran. The first distinct allusion to it known to Geiger is 

 in an Arabic work of the ninth century. "Hyacinthine 

 locks" are black locks, and Homer calls iron "violet- 

 coloured." Yellow was often confounded with green, but, 

 along with red, it was one of the earliest colours to receive a 

 distinct name. Aristotle names three colours in the rainbow 

 red, yellow, and green. Two centuries earlier Xenophanes 

 had described the rainbow as purple, reddish, and yellow. 

 The Pythagoreans admitted four primary colours white, 

 black, red, and yellow; the Chinese the same, with the 

 addition of green. 



Simultaneously with the first publication of this essay in 

 Macmillan's Magazine, there appeared in the Nineteenth Century 

 an article by Mr. Gladstone on the Colour-sense, chiefly as 

 exhibited in the poems of Homer. He shows that the few 

 colour -terms used by Homer are applied to such different 

 objects that they cannot denote colours only, as we perceive 

 and differentiate them, but seem more applicable to different 

 intensities of light and shade. Thus, to give one example, 

 the word porphureos is applied to clothing, to the rainbow, 

 to blood, to a cloud, to the sea, and to death ; and no one 

 meaning will suit all these applications except comparative 

 darkness. In other cases the same thing has many different 

 epithets applied to it according to its different aspects or 

 conditions ; and as the colours of objects are generally in- 

 dicated in ancient writings by comparative rather than by 

 abstract terms, as wine-colour, fire-colour, bronze-colour, etc., 

 it becomes still more difficult to determine in any par- 

 ticular case what colour was really meant. Mr. Gladstone's 

 general conclusion is, that the archaic man had a positive 

 perception only of degrees of light and darkness, and that in 



